No More Learning

But, if his view of man be mistaken, then the
whole fabric of his thought crumbles. When we recognise that
the individual is neither real nor intelligible apart from his social
origin and traditions, and that the social factor influences his
thought and motives, the opposition between self and others
becomes less fundamental, the abrupt alternatives of Hobbism
lose their validity and it is possible to regard morality and the
state as expressing the ideal and sphere of human activity, and
not as simply the chains by which man's unruly passions are kept in
check,
The most powerful criticism of Hobbes's political theory which
appeared in his lifetime was contained in the Oceana of James
Harrington, published in 1656; and the criticism gained in effec-
tiveness from the author's own constructive doctrine. This he set
forth under the thin disguise of a picture of an imaginary common-
wealth. The device was familiar enough at the time. More and
Bacon in England, and Campanella in Italy, had already followed
the ancient model by describing an ideal state, which both More
and Bacon placed in some unknown island of the west. The Utopia
of Sir Thomas More was published in 1516 and Englished by Ralph
Robynson in 1551. The work is a political romance. The spirit of
the renascence was still fresh when the author wrote, and it made
him imagine a new world to which the old order might conform,
and, by conforming, escape the evils of its present condition. There
is not any attempt at a philosophical analysis of the nature of the
state, but only an account of a government and people devoted to the
cause of social welfare. Supreme power is in the hands of a prince,
but he and all other magistrates are elected by the people; and
it is in its account of the life of the people that the interest of the
work lies. They detest war 'as a thing very beastly' and 'count
nothing so much against glory as glory gotten in war. ' Their life
is one of peace and freedom, of justice and equality. There is not
any oppression, industrial or religious; but work and enjoyment
are shared alike by all:
6
In other places, they speak still of the commonwealth, but every man pro
cureth his own private gain. Here where nothing is private, the common
affairs be earnestly looked upon. . . . Nothing is distributed after a niggish
sort, neither there is any poor man or beggar. And though no man have any
thing, yet every man is rich.


## p. 299 (#315) ############################################

New Atlantis and Oceana
299
Bacon's fable New Atlantis (1627) is only a fragment, and has
little of the charm that distinguishes More's romance. Its interest
lies in the description of Solomon's house, which may be taken as
Bacon's ideal of the public endowment of science. We are told
that his lordship thought also in this present fable to have com-
posed a frame of laws, or of the best state or mould of a common-
wealth’; but, unfortunately, he preferred to work at his natural
history, so that we learn nothing about the government of his ideal
community, and little about the social characteristics of the people,
though he descants on the dignity of their manners and on the
magnificence of their costumes.
Harrington's Oceana is a work of a different kind. It has none
of the imaginative quality of Utopia or even of New Atlantis.
Much of it reads like a state paper or the schedules of a budget.
The reference to present affairs is too thinly disguised for any
artistic purpose. 'Oceana' is, of course, England, and the lord
Archon pervades the book as his prototype, Oliver, pervaded the
English government. In all the councils of Oceana, he has always
the last word, and his speeches are long, convincing and wearisome;
he will even digress into sketching the history of the world. The
author was probably ill-advised when he threw his work into the
romantic form. He has a real insight into politics, and can see
some things which were concealed from Hobbes's vision. He never
loses sight of the important fact that government is only one factor
in social life. The form of government will follow the distribution
of property: 'where there is inequality of estates there must be
inequality of power; and where there is inequality of power there
can be no commonwealth. ' The commonwealth should exhibit
equality both in its foundation and in the superstructure. The
former is to be secured by an agrarian law limiting the amount of
property which can be held by one man, so that'no one man or number
of men, within the compass of the few or aristocracy, can come to over-
power the whole people by their possessions in land’; and Harrington
explained the recent change in the government of the country by
the gradual shifting of the balance of property from king and lords
to the commons. Equality in the superstructure will be attained
by means of a rotation or succession to the magistracy secured by
the suffrage of the people given by the ballot. ' In this way will
'
be constituted the three orders: 'the senate debating and proposing,
the people resolving, and the magistracy executing. ' The need for
distinguishing the orders is emphasised in Harrington's Political
Aphorisms, where he says that ‘a popular assembly without a senate


## p. 300 (#316) ############################################

300 Hobbes ana Contemporary Philosophy
6
cannot be wise,' and that a 'senate without a popular assembly will
not be honest. ' A commonwealth thus rightly instituted, so he thinks,
can never swerve from its principles, and has in it no 'principle of
mortality. Yet the constitution which he proposed comes short of
consistent democracy, and falls in with the spirit of the time. The
function of the one great man is recognised: 'a parliament of
physicians would never have found out the circulation of the
blood, nor would a parliament of poets have written Virgil's
Aeneis. ' Thus, the great man is right to aim at the sovereignty
when the times are out of joint, so that he may set them right and
establish the reign of law; and the book ends with his proclamation
as lord Archon for life. The nobility or gentry have, also, their
place:
there is something first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the govern-
ing of it, and last of all in the leading of its armies, which . . . seems to be
peculiar only to the genius of a gentleman.
Like Milton, Harrington argues for liberty of conscience in
matters of religion—though he would disallow 'popish, Jewish, or
idolatrous' worship. Unlike Milton, however, he does not exclude
the state from the sphere of religion:
a commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the con-
viction of a man's private conscience produces his private religion, the
conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion.
Sir Robert Filmer was also among the critics of Hobbes's
politics, though he owes his fame to the circumstance that he
was himself criticised by Locke. He maintained the doctrine of
absolute power as strongly as Hobbes did, and, like him, thought
that limited monarchy meant anarchy; and he had written on these
topics in king Charles's time. But he would not admit that this
power could rest on contract, and, in his Originall of Government
(1652), attacked Hobbes as well as Milton and Grotius. His own
views are set forth in his Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of
Kings, first published in 1680, twenty-seven years after his death.
Filmer was by no means devoid of critical insight. He saw that
the doctrine that all men are by nature free and equal is not true
historically and, therefore, is no good ground for making popular
consent the origin of government.
Late writers (he says] have taken up too much upon trust from the subtle
schoolmen, who to be sure to thrust down the king below the pope, thought it
the safest course to advance the people above the king.
He thinks that a great family, as to the rights of sovereignty, is a


## p. 301 (#317) ############################################

Critics of Hobbes's Politics
301
little monarchy,' and Hobbes had said the same; but Filmer traces
all kingship to the subjection of children to their parents, which is
both natural and a divine ordinance. There has never been a more
absolute dominion than that which Adam had over the whole world.
And kings are Adam's heirs. In developing this thesis, the author
diverges into a reading of history more fantastic than anything
suggested by Bellarmine or Hobbes, and delivers himself up an
easy prey to Locke's criticism.
Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, is also to be counted among
the critics of Hobbes's political theory. His Brief Survey of
the dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State in
Mr Hobbes's book (1674) is a protest against the paradoxes of
Leviathan, but is lacking in any element of constructive criticism.
John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, and, afterwards, archbishop of
Armagh, was one of the most vigorous and persistent of Hobbes's
critics. His first work was in defence of the royal power (1643).
Afterwards he engaged in a discussion of the question of free-will
with Hobbes when they were both in France. When the con-
troversy was renewed and became public, he wrote A Defence of
the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent and Ex-
trinsicall Necessity (1655). Hobbes replied, and Bramhall followed,
in 1658, with Castigations of Mr Hobbes, to which there was
an appendix called “The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale. '
In this appendix, more famous than the rest of the treatise, he
attacked the whole religious and political theory of Hobbes, and
gave rise to the complaint of the latter that the bishop
hath put together diverse sentences picked out of my Leviathan, which stand
there plainly and firmly proved, and sets them down without their proofs, and
without the order of their dependance one upon another; and calls them
atheism, blasphemy, impiety, subversion of religion, and by other names of
that kind.
Two younger polemical writers may be mentioned along with
Bramhall. Thomas Tenison, a future archbishop of Canterbury,
was one of the young churchmen militant who must needs try
their arms 'in thundering upon Hobbes's steel-cap. ' In The Creed
of Mr Hobbes examined (1670), he selected a number of Hobbes's
confident assertions and set them together so as to show their
mutual inconsistencies. In two dialogues, published in 1672 and
1673, John Eachard, afterwards master of St Catharine's hall,
Cambridge, adopted a similar method, and showed no little wit
and learning in his criticism.
These writers are the most notable of a number of early critics


## p. 302 (#318) ############################################

302 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
6
of Hobbes who made no independent contributions of their own to
philosophy. And their criticism dealt with results rather than with
principles. A satisfactory criticism of Hobbes has to penetrate to
the principles of the mechanical philosophy which he adopted, and
to the view of human nature which he set forth in conformity with
those principles. Criticism of this more fundamental kind was
attempted by certain of the Cambridge Platonists-, especially by
Cudworth and More; and they were fitted for the task by their
sympathetic study of the spiritual philosophy of Plato in the
ancient world and of Descartes in their own day-two thinkers for
whom Hobbes had no appreciation.
Joseph Glanvill was intimately associated with some members of
the Cambridge school-in particular, with Henry More—but he was
himself educated at Oxford, and he was not a Platonist. He had,
however, many points of sympathy with them. He was attracted
by the new philosophy of Descartes—he calls it the 'best philo-
sophy'—whereas he had nothing but criticism for the Aristotelianism
that still ruled the schools of Oxford. He was in sympathy, also,
with the broad and reasonable tone that distinguished the theology
of the Cambridge Platonists from the prevailing attitude of the
puritan divines. Glanvill's mind was sensitive to all the influences
of the time: the new science, the human culture, the contending
doctrines in philosophy and theology. The result was a distrust of
all dogmatic systems, combined with a certain openness of mind-a
readiness to receive light from any quarter. His first and most
famous book was The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), and a revised
edition of the same was published in 1665 with the title Scepsis
scientifica: or Confest Ignorance the way to Science. This was
dedicated to the Royal Society, of which he had become a fellow
in 1664. In philosophy, Glanvill professed himself a seeker. He
discoursed on the defects in our knowledge even of the things
nearest to us, such as the nature of the soul and the body: he
held that reason is swayed by the emotions, so that most of the
contests of the litigious world pretending for truth are but the
bandyings of one man's affections against another's. His chief
censures were for the dogmas of the Aristotelians, and this in-
volved him in controversy with the learned Mr Thomas White,'
a priest of Douay, collaborator with Sir Kenelm Digby, and a
voluminous author, who answered The Vanity of Dogmatizing in
a Latin treatise entitled Sciri, sive sceptices et scepticorum a jure
a
1 A chapter on the Cambridge Platonists will appear in the next volume of this
work.


## p. 303 (#319) ############################################

Joseph Glanvill
303
2
disputationis exclusio. It is in his reply to this writer that
Glanvill defines his scepticism as a 'way of enquiry, which is not
to continue still poring upon the writings and opinions of philo-
sophers, but to seek truth in the great book of nature. ' The Royal
Society, realising Bacon's prophetic scheme of Solomon's house,
had adopted this method, and had done more for the improvement
of useful knowledge than all the philosophers of the notional way
since Aristotle opened his shop in Greece. ' Glanvill himself ven-
tured upon a 'continuation of the New Atlantis' in his essay
Antifanatick Theologie, and Free Philosophy. His openness of
mind and his conviction that authority and sense are our only
evidence on such matters led to his belief in supernatural appear-
ances. He thought that 'the testimony of all ages' established
their reality. And he distrusted the dogmatism of what he called
'modern Sadducism': to him, it was a 'matter of astonishment
that men, otherwise witty and ingenious, are fallen into the conceit
that there's no such thing as a witch or apparition. '
Other writers of the period showed the influence of the new
ideas. From the scholastic point of view, Samuel Parker, bishop
of Oxford, criticised both Hobbes and Descartes, a treatise on
Cartesianism having been published in England in 1675 by Antoine
Legrand, of Douay, a Franciscan friar and member of the English
mission. In his Court of the Gentiles (1669–77), Theophilus
Gale traced all ancient learning and philosophy to the Hebrew
scriptures. John Pordage wrote a number of works, the mysticism
of which was inspired by Jacob Boehme. The treatise De legibus
naturae, published in 1672, by Richard Cumberland, afterwards
bishop of Peterborough, is much more than a criticism of
Hobbes. It is a restatement of the doctrine of the law of nature
as furnishing the ground of the obligation of all the moral virtues.
The work is heavy in style, and its philosophical analysis lacks
thoroughness; but its insistence on the social nature of man, and
its doctrine of the common good as the supreme law of morality,
anticipate the direction taken by much of the ethical thought of
the following century.


## p. 304 (#320) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
SCHOLARS AND SCHOLARSHIP, 1600—60
THE starting-point of English scholarship and learning in the
seventeenth century is not the humanism of the early renascence.
The main current was diverted from its onward flow by the events
of the reign of queen Mary and the political and ecclesiastical
exigencies of queen Elizabeth's reign. From the moment of the
return of the English exiles from Geneva, Frankfort and Strass-
burg, the conviction set in of the necessity of a discipline in life
and learning founded on the Bible. This conviction permeated
every activity of the nation, putting energetic representatives of
learning and education in the very front of the propaganda, and
reserving meditative scholars as the very bulwarks of defence.
William Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants maintained that
the Bible alone is the religion of protestants; and, in the thought
of the age, the Bible, also, was the centre towards which all
scholarship could gravitate most profitably and creditably, and by
which it could most certainly gain acceptance and stability. The
usefulness of learning became almost axiomatic, so long as 'human'
was kept subsidiary to divine' learning. The older humanism
'
which dominated Erasmus, Thomas More and Thomas Elyot was
crushed. The day had passed for placing Aristotle, Plato, Seneca,
side by side, in the joyful enthusiasm for new found comrades, with
New Testament writers, or with St Chrysostom and St Jerome,
fearlessly running the risk of unifying sacred and profane,
in the common appeal to antiquity. The fires of Smithfield
in Mary's reign and the penal inflictions of Elizabeth, together
with the St Bartholomew massacres in France, stirred, in the
minds of both the opposing parties, the intuition that the
struggle between Roman Catholics and protestantism was a per-
sonal concern as well as a national issue and, if there was
authority on the one side, there must be authority on the
other. The issue, necessarily, was the church versus the book.


## p. 305 (#321) ############################################

The Puritans
305
If the contest was not to be by fire and sword solely, the only
alternative was that in the arena of scholarship. The extreme
puritan view of a discipline in religion, based only on the Bible,
was soon found to be ineffective against opponents like the
Jesuits, who commanded all the resources of Bible erudition, as
well as of scholarship in ecclesiastical history, for disputational
purposes. The most redoubtable protestant advocates were, of
necessity, increasingly driven to include in their scholarly studies
the early Fathers as well as the Bible, and to agree that the
primitive church had at least a high degree of authority. But
the main point in tracing the course of this scholarship is to
realise that the church, the early Fathers, the Bible, constituted
authorities to which appeal could be made, and that both Catholics
and their opponents had to pursue, with an intensity of applica-
tion unequalled before or since, the history of antiquity in so far
as it concerned these issues. Christianity, whether of the church
or of the Bible, was a historical religion-and to imply either
aspect was to bring the argument into the historical environ-
ments within which these crucial sanctities had their origin,
development and continuity.
The puritans, who staked their all intellectually on Bible-
centred knowledge, might have confined English scholarship to
the narrowest of limits. England, as J. R. Green has said, became
'the people of one book, and that book the Bible. ' But there
were other influences at work, in this period, which tended to
enlarge the scope of intellectual interests. The spirit of national
enterprise and sea exploit that characterised queen Elizabeth's
reign continued to mark the Stewart period, and transferred itself
into intellectual efforts in new directions. The companies of
Merchant Adventurers made a discovery of the east, as Columbus
had discovered America. Eastern languages were learned and
transmitted, and oriental MSS were triumphantly brought home
to eager scholars. Physical adventure in east and west tended to
provoke fearlessness of enquiry into natural science. The old sea
groups of Hawkins, Ralegh, Frobisher gave place to the camaraderie
of intellectual centres like the society of Antiquaries, gatherings
of gentlemen-investigators, such as Falkland's group at Great
Tew? , Hartlib's group in London and the groups at Oxford,
Cambridge, London, which coalesced into the Royal Society? All
these and other groups were fascinated by the expanding spacious-
ness of physical research and the love of truth, and ideals of
1 See ante, chap. vi.
See post, vol. viii,
6
E L. VII.
CH. XIII.
20


## p. 306 (#322) ############################################

306 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
independent enquiry stimulated them to complete the knowledge
of the Orbis Visibilis and Orbis Intellectualis, and to supply
'gaps' such as those indicated by Bacon.
Besides native sources of wider development than could
be gained from the Bible centre alone, the close connection of
English scholars with foreign scholars must be taken into account.
England was drawn close to the continent after the return of
protestant exiles. Of the twenty-one bishops whom queen
Elizabeth appointed, thirteen had passed most of queen Mary's
reign in Germany or Switzerland, and the 650 letters on theo-
logical subjects published by the Parker society show the close
relationship between English protestants and their fellow believers
abroad. English bishops remembered Geneva in the days of her
tribulation, by the practical method of sending remittances for the
relief of distress when the duke of Savoy was harassing that city.
In 1583, by royal brief, a collection for the Genevese was made in
the churches of England, which brought in £5039. Calvin's Insti-
tutes was translated into English in 1559, by Thomas Norton, and
ran through many editions. Almost all the chief Elizabethan
divines were Zwinglian or Calvinist in doctrine, and were in
communication with foreign theologians and scholars. When the
Spanish armies of Alva were devastating the Low Countries,
distressed protestant Fleming refugees came to England in
hundreds! , while the earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney took
some thousands of Englishmen to fight for the Dutch cause. Pre-
viously, Sir Walter Ralegh had fought for the Huguenots in
France. The duke of Buckingham's duplicity and feebleness in
attempting the relief of La Rochelle in Charles I's reign caused
boundless indignation in England. The sympathy of Cromwell and
the English people with the protestants of Piedmont was sufficient, in
1655, to open the national exchequer for grants to schoolmasters,
ministers, physicians, even to students in divinity and physic.
The continuity of these close relations, political and per-
sonal, with foreign protestants, is of capital importance in under-
standing the history of English scholarship. For, while England
largely owed its concentrative group of Bible studies to Geneva,
the greatest classical scholarship of the sixteenth century had
been shown by French Huguenots, and the chief glories of scholar-
ship in the seventeenth century were clustered together in
1 The frequent immigrations into England of Huguenots and other foreign religious
refugees form an important subject in English commercial history. See Cunningham,
W. , Alien Immigrants to England, chaps. Iv and vi.


## p. 307 (#323) ############################################

C
307
French and Dutch Scholars
; ;;
LH
10
? !
Holland ; and France and Holland, in each age, respectively, were
the countries with which our divines and scholars were in closest
touch. Thus, in the sixteenth century, French scholarship had
been transfigured by the genius and research of Budaeus, Turnebus,
Lambinus and the Stephenses, and the succession into the seven-
teenth century included Casaubon and Salmasius. In 1593, Joseph
Scaliger went to Holland to the university of Leyden (founded 1575).
Dutch scholarship was the ripest in Europe from 1600—60 and
included G. J. Vossius, Isaac Vossius (his son), Claude Saumaise
or Salmasius, P. Cluverius? , Daniel Heinsius, N. Heinsius (his son),
Hugo Grotius, J. F. Gronovius. The interest of this list consists
in the fact that all these distinguished scholars were in direct
touch with English scholars. The older Vossius corresponded,
for instance, with Thomas Farnaby; Isaac Vossius actually left
Holland and lived in England, where he held a prebend at
Windsor for sixteen years (1673—88). Salmasius had the famous
controversy with Milton. From his contemporary, Daniel Heinsius,
Ben Jonson borrowed freely in his Timber. Heinsius's son Nicholas
travelled in England. Hugo Grotius wrote his famous Mare
liberum (1609) to assert the international right of the seas, and
John Selden in 1635 published his answer Mare Clausum, written
about 1619. The brother-in-law of G. J. Vossius, Franciscus
Junius, himself a man of no mean learning, left Holland to come
to England as librarian to the earl of Arundel, and remained in
this post for 30 years. He published his De Pictura Veterum,
in Latin, in 1637, and, in English, in 1638. Junius was drawn
into the enthusiasm for British antiquities and produced an
edition of Caedmon, in 1655, and the Moeso-Gothic text of Ulfilas
in 1664–5; and he left in MS an English etymology which
served the turn of Johnson's Dictionary.
The direct influence of these great French and Dutch scholars
was reinforced by the general state of culture prevalent among
foreign protestants. Travelling was a constituent part of the educa-
tion of the well-to-do. The travelling of men with messages of
goodwill, or of advice to the various churches abroad, brought
about an appreciation of standards of knowledge and learning.
Correspondence between learned men and religious leaders filled
the place of modern reviews and newspapers. Reports of new
books and learned investigations penetrated into remote corners
and at a pace unexampled in the previous history of the world.
ar
DI
reperto
KA
1 P. Cluverius was one of the many 'sojourners' with John Prideaux, rector of
Exeter college, Oxford.
chil
be
>
20_2


## p. 308 (#324) ############################################

308 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
Frankfort and Leipzig fairs collected and circulated books broad-
cast. Dutch presses found a large English market. England was
thus within reach of the best of foreign culture, because she
was protestant after the Genevan type ; and much of the most
solid foreign scholarship, in the seventeenth century, was directly
or indirectly under the spell of Calvin. An interesting indica-
tion of the religious sympathies which united English and foreign
protestants is the growth of the custom of sending boys and girls
to French Huguenot academies and pastors, or English youths to
the university of Leyden; on the other hand, an English scholar such
as Thomas Gataker could maintain for some time a private seminary
in his house at Rotherhithe, and ‘many foreigners went and lodged
with him, that they might enjoy the benefit of his advice. '
Casaubon, when in straitened means in Paris, received lord
Herbert of Cherbury as boarder as he had received young Henry
Wotton in his house at Geneva. Before the Pilgrim fathers went to
America, they had sojourned in Dutch cities, established con-
gregations there and appointed ministers in Amsterdam and
Leyden. There was an English congregation at Rotterdam, whose
minister was William Ames, who, for twelve years, had been pro-
fessor in the university of Franeker in Friesland. William Bedell,
who was chaplain to Wotton at Venice for about three years,
penned his sermons in Italian and Latin, wrote an English grammar
so that Italians might learn to read English sermons and trans-
lated father Paul's works into Latin for all protestant Europe to
read.
The great mathematician John Wallis wrote an English
grammar (in Latin) for the use of foreigners. The great English
disputant John Featley lived three years in France and did great
honour to his nation and protestantism by disputing successfully
against the most learned papists. ' Matthew Slade, an Oxford
graduate, became rector of the academy at Amsterdam and
distinguished himself by entering the lists against the scholar
Conrad Vorstius. David Primrose, a Scot, became minister
of the Huguenot church at Rouen. The chaplaincies of the
Merchant companies of England, especially the Levant company,
at Aleppo, furnished important opportunities for the cultivation
of oriental languages. The greatest of these chaplains was
Edward Pococke. The name of Thomas Davies, resident at
Aleppo, is memorable for his services in securing oriental MSS
for archbishop Ussher (1624—7).
Many were the distinguished foreigners who found a home
in England. Antonio de Dominis, once Roman Catholic arch-
6


## p. 309 (#325) ############################################

0
Roman Catholic Scholarship 309
ir
RAD
Ear
#រ
, ܨܶܕ݂
21
bishop of Spalatro, was made dean of Windsor in 1617, and
maintained the rights of national churches, but left England in
1622 and recanted. Saravia and Peter du Moulin, like Isaac
Vossius, held English prebends. John Verneuil, of Bordeaux,
was appointed second keeper of the Bodleian library in 1625.
Matthias Pasor lectured on oriental languages at Exeter college,
Oxford, 1625—9, whilst Christian Ravis of Berlin taught the
same subjects in Gresham college, London, in 1642. John Milton,
in 1649, was appointed secretary for foreign tongues, succeeding
G. R. Weckherlin, a native of Stuttgart, fluent in German, French
and English, and a writer of verses in each of those languages.
The great Albericus Gentilis had lectured on law in Oxford. Isaac
Casaubon took up his abode here from 1610 to 1614 and held a
prebend at Canterbury with a pension of £300 a year.
The influence of Roman Catholic scholarship perhaps consti-
tuted the most potent stimulus to the prodigious efforts of pro-
testant erudition in this period. In the latter half of the sixteenth
century, Jesuits had regained France and southern Germany for
Rome, and protestants were in peril of their lives. Jesuits had
taken the lead in polite letters and had trained themselves in
classical style. Yet the whole course of their studies, ‘however
deeply grounded in erudition or embellished by eloquence, had
one perpetual aim—the propagation of the Catholic faith. Jesuit
colleges were the admiration of every scholar. Three years'
work was devoted to philosophy, and four years' drill was given in
theology. Thus were trained the combatants who gained back
France and part of Germany to Rome, and bid fair, at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, to extirpate protestantism
everywhere. Towering above the army of disputants thus
produced, cardinal Bellarmine swept the field in controversial
theology. In these controversies, England was not unrepresented,
but English writers found it increasingly necessary to equip
themselves further in specialistic learning and dialectical skill
in order to meet their opponents. The war was carried on in
England by William Whitaker, the great Calvinistic scholarly
churchman of queen Elizabeth's reign, and, in the same reign,
and in that of James I, by Matthew Sutcliffe, afterwards dean
of Exeter; by John Rainolds, king James I, Lancelot Andrewes
and Francis Mason. On the Catholic side, one of the most dis-
tinguished English disputants was William Rainolds, brother of
John Rainolds.
Inconsiderable in point of learning as some of these theo-
Bet
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Art
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42"
23


## p. 310 (#326) ############################################

310 Scholars and Scholarship,
Scholarship, 1600—60
logical disputations may be, the controversies largely determined
the line of direction of scholarly effort. It is significant that, in
1610, James I incorporated a college to be called by his name at
Chelsea. Matthew Sutcliffe gave considerable funds to the pro-
ject, and was appointed provost. Its occupants were to be men
of war,' reserved for polemical studies. Besides the study of
divinity, two historians were to be maintained, 'to record and
publish to posterity all memorable passages in Church and
Commonwealth. ' The college, ultimately, was seized by parliament
during the interregnum. Samuel Hartlib, in 1655, in a letter to
John Worthington, master of Jesus college, Cambridge, laments
its confiscation. 'Bishops and Deans are gone,' he says. It
would be a scandal, if 'we betray or destroy an incomparable
engine already prepared. . . for the defence of the Truth. '
But a still higher stimulus to protestant learning was provided
in 1588—1609 when the greatest of Roman Catholic researchers,
cardinal Baronius, produced his twelve folios of Annales Eccle-
siastici:
"The whole case,' says Mark Pattison,‘of the Romanists and especially the
supremacy of the See of Rome was here set out in the form of authentic
annals. . . . The Annales transferred to the Catholic party the preponderance
in the field of learning which ever since Erasmus had been on the side of the
innovators. ?
It became the object of protestant learning to devote itself to the
effective criticism and refutation of the statements and argu-
ments of Baronius. No mere reliance on scriptural texts could
meet the emergency. Learning could only be fairly and finally
met by learning. Zealously English scholars strained themselves
to the utmost. John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi
college, Oxford, attempted, from the puritanic side, the task of
refuting Baronius in 1602. All English efforts, however, pale into
insignificance beside the work of Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris
et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI ad Baronii annales (1614).
Next to Joseph Scaliger in Leyden, who died in 1609, Isaac
Casaubon was regarded as the most learned scholar in Europe,
and his residence in London from 1610 to 1614 proved the
attractiveness to his scholarly mind of the theological attitude
of men like Lancelot Andrewes. Casaubon’s residence in England
was an incalculable stimulus to the industry and research of the
new 'Anglican' school that was rising over the heads of the
puritan groups.
Whilst Casaubon was admired by the protestant world for his


## p. 311 (#327) ############################################

Casaubon
311
classical and patristic scholarship, there was not a little mis-
giving that he lost his opportunity in his Exercitationes of
refuting the doctrinal theology of Baronius, and it was feared
that he had failed to return the undermining attacks of Jesuits
on protestant bulwarks. But Casaubon was not a gladiator like
Scioppius. He had gone through fiery torments of indecision in
taking the one side rather than the other. In the inner sanctity
of his conscience, the cause of truth was enshrined. The older
ideal of imitation, both in form and in substance, of the great
classical writers of antiquity had now passed. It was essential
for those engaged in theological conflict on an intellectual plane to
know. But knowledge, which goes to the root of matters, must
use both a trained judgment and the results of independent
enquiries into the ideas and thoughts as well as the surroundings
of the ancient world, if it is to represent a solid basis for the
thought of the present. To the keenest scholars of the seven-
teenth century, among whom Casaubon was conspicuously the first,
the foundations of theological truth necessarily had to be sought
in the earlier centuries of the Christian era. Casaubon had
devoted his faculties, heightened and refined by almost in-
credible application, unparalleled even in that age of classical
scholars, to critical work in respect of the writings of Strabo,
Athenaeus, Persius and Polybius. On all these, he brought to
bear a knowledge of classical antiquity which seemed at once
universal in its comprehensiveness and selective in its adequacy
for the point in hand, so much so that his commentary on Strabo
has not been superseded.
Casaubon only lived to complete the first half of the first
volume of his criticism of Baronius's mighty tomes. Much of the
800 folio pages is occupied with a re-tracing of Baronius's tracks,
correcting and rebutting, point by point. Constructive work,
indeed, there was, in the form of dissertations. But the essential
significance of the history of seventeenth century scholarship is the
object-lesson which its productions furnish, providing students in
the Bible studies, in patristic learning and in church history with a
standard of research, intellectual persistency, scholarly apparatus
and equipment.
The dissatisfaction of English controversialists with Casaubon's
method of critical correction rather than of concentration on
doctrinal disputation was made manifest in the effort of Richard
Mountague, who, in his Analecta Exercitationum ecclesiasticarum,
1622, 'went over the same ground again, to show how Casaubon


## p. 312 (#328) ############################################

312 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
ought to have done it but could not. Mountague and the Greek
professor of Cambridge, Andrew Downes, had been among the
coadjutors of Sir Henry Savile in the production of the wonderful
eight volume Eton edition of St Chrysostom's works (1612).
Savile had collected MSS of Chrysostom, and, with Casaubon’s aid,
he had had the MSS in the Royal library of Paris collated, and
had organised the revision of the text by the most learned Greek
scholars in England, himself defraying the cost of production,
computed at £8000. No edition of a Greek author, in England or
in Europe, in the first part of the seventeenth century, could vie
with this work in the splendour of its production. Casaubon and
Savile, though not on good terms personally, were united by the
publication in England of two of the greatest works of scholarship
of the age, and in the inauguration on the highest plane of that
patristic study which constituted the chief feature of English
scholarship in the period 1600—60.
Throughout the period, works of learned men, whether divines or
laymen, abound in allusions disclosing a knowledge of the Fathers,
the councils and ecclesiastical history. Calamy, a member of the
Westminster assembly, is said to have read through St Augustine's
works five times, and to have thoroughly mastered the Summa
of Aquinas. Thomas Holland, the Oxford professor of divinity,
was familiar with the Fathers 'as if he himself were a Father
and in the schoolmen as if he had been a seraphical doctor. '
Henry Jackson, a country rector in Gloucestershire, collected
several of the works of Abelard from ancient MSS, and revised
and collated them ; but, in 1642, his collection was scattered by
parliamentary soldiers. Archbishop Ussher, at 20 years of age, ,
resolved to go through all the Fathers by himself and 'to trust no
eyes but his own. ' He took eighteen years over the task, “strictly
confining himself to read so much in a day and suffering no
occasion whatever' to divert him from it. Laymen as well as
divines were close students ; physicians, lawyers, schoolmasters
knew the Fathers, at least for the purpose of embellishing their
writings. In the directions which James I issued to the universities
in 1616, students in divinity were
6
to be incited to bestow their times in the Fathers and Councils, Schoolmen,
Histories and Controversies, and not to insist so long upon Compendiums
and abbreviations as the grounds of their study in Divinity.
Thus, the spread of patristic learning in England in the first half
of the seventeenth century is not to be judged merely by the


## p. 313 (#329) ############################################

Classical Scholarship 313
incidental scholarship shown by Anglican divines. It also per-
vaded many puritan divines; it characterised many of the leading
preachers, like Jeremy Taylor. Different as the subjects of these
writings are, Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy,
Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, William Prynne, in
his Histriomastix (who quotes testimony from 71 Fathers and 55
synods) show that writers found in the Fathers a court of appeal
with an authority generally recognised, and the literature of the
period revels in multitudinous quotations patristic as well as
classical.
The higher criticism which now is occupied with the Bible
then lavished its learning on the Fathers. For, though John
Daillé, the most learned French pastor in patristic knowledge, in
his Usage des Pères, 1628, deprecated absolute reliance on this
authority, the subject was acknowleged, by all interested in
scholarship, to be of profound relative importance, and only to
be transcended by a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures them-
selves, which, again, depended upon light thrown on them by
patristic studies.
The seventeenth century entered into a noble heritage of
accumulated knowledge of the classics. The sixteenth century
had been a period of acquisition and ingathering of knowledge
of classical authors; and grammars, rhetorics and logics, together
with phrase-books, colloquies, vocabularies and dictionaries,
collections of adages, apophthegms, epigrams, proverbs, emblems,
synonyms, were rapidly produced. Not only were the whole of the
available literary remains of Rome and Greece thus presented,
but they were broken up into such a systematic analysis that
every detail was at hand for the synthetic process of composition
modelled on the style of Cicero or Demosthenes. With marvellous
skill and prodigious research, analytical and inductive methods
were applied more and more daringly to writing on topics concern-
ing Roman and Greek antiquities, as well as on medieval and
modern history and contemporary events and interests. As the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had developed style and form
in writing the classical languages, the seventeenth century entered
into assured possession of literary instruments for the treatment
of all kinds of material of investigation and enquiry. In the
earlier part of the seventeenth century, works of importance,
however long and recondite, were written in Latin, not merely
from the love of masterful pedantry, but for the absolutely
practical reason that Latin was the international language of


## p. 314 (#330) ############################################

314 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
6
well educated people'. A typical instance was Bacon, with his
Novum Organum and De Augmentis Scientiarum, the latter of
which was an expansion of the treatise in English named The
Advancement of Learning. The publication of books in both
Latin and English thus marks a transition stage in the move-
ment from Latin to English, as the medium for communication.
But it will be remembered that Copernicus, Gilbert, Harvey,
Newton, announced their scientific discoveries in Latin, not
because they were profound classical students, but because Latin
was the common language of scientific writers at home and abroad,
as it was the ordinary language both for speech and writing between
scholars, scientific people, professional men and diplomatists.
The erudite Savile was Latin secretary to queen Elizabeth.
In 1644, the title of the office was changed to 'Secretary for
Foreign Tongues to the Joint Committee for the two Kingdoms,'
and, as already stated, it was under this designation that John
Milton assumed the post in 1649. Though this is a sign of the
coming change, when the French ascendency in Charles Il's reign
was to lead, eventually, to the substitution of that language in the
sphere of diplomacy, it is not to be supposed that the change
was a tour de force. It had been silently prepared for in the
close rapprochement of England with French protestants and in
the inter-relations already described. Yet, in 1659, John Pell,
on a mission in Germany, spoke Latin to a burgomaster 'who
told me he had given over speaking in Latin these 50 years,'
and answered in High Dutch. Edward Leigh, in his Advice on
Travel (c. 1660), still requires gentlemen to be well equipped in
conversational Latin. Academically, the ideal of Latin-speaking was
well preserved. Brinsley, in his Ludus Literarius, 1612, expects
school lessons in grammar to be conducted by questions and
answers in the Latin language. Disputations and orations were
in this language, not only in universities but, also, in grammar
schools. Casaubon conversed in Latin with James I and with the
bishops ; university plays were often in Latin ; and sermons had
to be in the same tongue for degrees in divinity. In 1635, Cor-
nelius Burgess preached in Latin to his fellow puritan ministers in
London. In fact, Latin occupied very much the position that
mathematics now assumes on the modern side of a public school,
in relation to physical science studies. It provided the necessary
equipment for other studies, and the school curriculum was framed
1 In 1635, Sir Francis Kynaston published a translation into Latin of Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde, for the use of foreign readers.
6


## p. 315 (#331) ############################################

Latin Scholarship
315
with a view to relieving the university from its teaching. The
curriculum consisted of Pueriles Confabulatiunculae (children's
Latin talk), colloquies, catechisms in Latin and Greek, systematic
grammar, translation and re-translation, and the whole round of
vocabularies, the making of Latins, letter-writing (on the model
of Cicero's Epistulae, proceeding to those of modern writers-
Politian, Erasmus, Ascham, Manutius, Lipsius—and the composi-
tion, concurrently, of original epistles), themes, with full equip-
ment of adages, apophthegmata, flores, phrase-books; then making
verses, and, finally, the glory of sixth form work, producing and
declaiming original orations. Thus, the school discipline in Latin
was never more complete than in the first half of the seventeenth
century. For, in all the above divisions of work, a bewildering
collection of text-books had accumulated, and the foreign ap-
paratus of Latin study was more prominent in English schools than
the text-books written by Englishmen. Nothing, perhaps, better
illustrates the progress of Latin studies than the increase in size,
exactness and comprehensiveness, of Latin dictionaries, say from
that of Elyot's Dictionary in 1538 to Holyoke's posthumous
monster Dictionary of 1676, or, indeed, from the first edition
of Francis Holyoke in 1617 to the final form given to it by his
son in 1676.
If the output of critical scholarship in Latin by English
scholars in this period be relatively small, it is accounted for by
the fact that excellent editions of Latin classical writers had
already been provided in foreign editions, as, for instance, in the
Elzevir texts. What was accomplished was, therefore, rather in
the way of selection and compilation from the research work of
foreign Goliaths of scholarship.
The highest Latin scholarship was centred in its practical use
in writing, as, for instance, in the works of Ussher, Gataker and
Selden. As showing a fluent control over rhythm, metre and
style, English writers made a high bid for excellence, in the
persons of such Latin poets as Owen, Barclay, Dempster, Milton,
May and Cowley? .
If Latin, then, was a necessity, Greek, also, was a pressing accom-
plishment, for a large constituency besides the professor and
scholar. Nor were Greek experts so few as is often supposed.
In The Authorised Version of the Bible (1607—11), adequate
See the account of John Barclay's Argenis and Euphormionis Satyricon (ante,
vol. iv, pp. 254 ff. ). The anonymous ' Nova Solyma (1648), with its remarkable
scheme of education, deserves mention.


## p. 316 (#332) ############################################

316 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
scholarship in Greek was available in Thomas Ravis, George Abbot,
James Montague, Thomson, Savile, Perin, Harmar, William Barlow,
Hutchinson, Spencer, Fenton, Rabbett, Sanderson, Dakins. Of
the other translators employed on the Old Testament Apocrypha,
John Duport, Downes and Bois were of still greater renown for their
knowledge of Greek. J. Bass Mullinger remarks on the low
state of Greek in English universities in the latter part of the
sixteenth century. He names Whitaker, Dering, Gabriel Harvey,
Aylmer, as almost alone proving that Greek at Cambridge was
‘not extinct. ' It was otherwise in the period 1600—60. Andrew
Downes, professor of Greek in Cambridge from 1585 to 1625,
published lectures on Lysias: De Caede Eratosthenis (1593) and
on Demosthenes: De Pace (1621). Francis Hicks, a gentleman of
Worcestershire, made Greek his study and recreation, and pub-
lished a translation into Latin, with notes, of select dialogues of
Lucian, 1634. John Price, one of the greatest scholars of the
period, professor of Greek at Pisa, showed great learning in his
commentaries on the New Testament, illustrated by references to
Greek and Latin Fathers (1646—7). In 1636, Gerard Langbaine
published his notes on Longinus. In 1637, John Harmar, regius
professor of Greek at Oxford, issued his etymological Greek lexicon.
In 1652, Thomas Gataker produced his Marcus Antoninus, Greek
text, with Latin translation and commentary. Finally, in 1661,
Joseph Caryl, Thomas Cockayne, Ralph Venning, William Dell,
Matthew Barker, William Adderley, Matthew Mead, Henry Jersey,
all nonconformist ministers, jointly published a Greek-English
dictionary of all the words in the New Testament.
This list is only representative of the types of works in Greek.
But we must take into account the undoubtedly deep knowledge
of Greek possessed by Gataker (who had been taught by Bois),
overshadowed as it is by his Hebrew and other oriental studies;
by Ussher with his expert knowledge of Greek geography,
astronomy and other Greek material for chronology, his treatise
on the origin of the Greek Septuagint and the editing of two
ancient Greek versions of the Book of Esther ; by Selden, the
great dictator of English learning, in his Marmora Arundeliana,
1628, in which he was helped by Patrick Young and Richard
James ; by John Hales and the Cambridge Platonists ; by John
Milton ; by Philemon Hollandand the other translators.
1 Although Philemon Holland cannot be regarded as a scholar in the same sense as
Salmasius in Plinianae Exercitationes (1629), his translation of Pliny justifies the
attribution to him of considerable Latin learning. Holland's translation of Plutarch's
Moralia (1603) and the Cyropaedia of Xenophon (1632) show his knowledge of Greek.


## p. 317 (#333) ############################################

Greek Scholarship
317
In
Besides grammar text-books and annotations on Greek authors,
there is evidence of ready knowledge of Greek in all kinds of
writers, and indications of a not uncommon erudition. Jeremiah
Whitaker, of Oakham free school, read all the epistles in the
Greek Testament twice every fortnight. John Conant, regius
professor of divinity in Oxford, often disputed publicly in Greek
in the schools. In the period 1648–59, the disputations at
Oxford were often in Greek. Henry Stubbe, in 1651, wrote,
in Horae Subsecivae, translations into Greek from Randolph and
Crashaw. But the readiest in this art was James Duport, who
wrote Greek hexameters on the death of the vice-master of
Trinity college, Cambridge. He rendered into Homeric verse
The Book of Job (1637) and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and The
Song of Solomon (1646), and won high recognition by these
feats.
From this brief review, it is evident, especially as to the years
immediately preceding 1660, that the attraction in Greek studies
is drawing towards Biblical literature; and Hebrew is becoming
a necessary learned language. From the time of the new
Elizabethan and Stewart foundations of grammar schools, the
three ‘holy' languages-Latin, Greek and Hebrew-had been
the aim of protestant workers in education, not only for providing
antagonists capable of meeting Catholic opponents in disputa-
tion, orally and in books, but, also, for coming 'nearer' to the
primitive times of the Christian era. Boys in school were to
learn their catechism in a Greek text, read the New Testament
in Greek, learn, if might be, to speak in Greek. The aim of
school and university, in their Greek studies, was, in the long
run, theological. Theological study required, in addition to Latin,
a knowledge of the Greek language; if possible, of Hebrew also; and
Busby, at Westminster, tried the daring experiment of adding
oriental languages (Arabic particularly). For The Authorised Ver-
sion of the Old Testament (with the Apocrypha), thirty-two Hebrew
scholars were chosen. These included that second Mithridates'in
learning, bishop Lancelot Andrewes ; Adrian Saravia, who was the
teacher of the still more learned oriental scholar Nicholas Fuller;
Lively, for thirty years regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge ;
Chaderton, the famous master of Emmanuel college, Cambridge;
Spalding, from whom Gataker learned the rudiments of Hebrew;
John Rainolds of Oxford, the redoubtable controversialist ; Hol-
land, of the same university, "mighty in the Scriptures’; Kilby,
rector of Lincoln college ; Miles Smith, of whom Wood says that
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## p. 318 (#334) ############################################

318 Scholars and Scholarship,
6
Scholarship, 1600—60
he had Hebrew 'at his fingers' ends, and to whom Chaldee,
Syriac and Arabic were 'almost as familiar as his native tongue';
Samuel Ward, who was the constant correspondent of Ussher in
Biblical and oriental criticism ; John Bois, who was at least as
learned in Greek as in Hebrew; and that 'eminent light' in all
learning, bishop Bilson, the great theologian, and a reviewer of
the whole translation. Cambridge and Oxford were thus fully
represented, and the needs of a great joint work of learning were
readily and adequately met by the supply of scholars.
Whilst The Authorised Version of the Bible itself marked an
era, the progress of oriental learning was carried to far greater
heights in the succeeding half century. William Bedell read the
Greek Fathers and historians in Greek, attained 'no mean skill'
in the Syriac, Arabic, Chaldee and Hebrew tongues, wrote (as
already mentioned) an English grammar for Italians to read
English divinity, and produced the Old Testament in Irish when
he became bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh. James Ussher, arch-
bishop of Armagh, investigated, by inductive and comparative
methods, a basis of universal chronology. With indefatigable zeal,
he worked on the antiquities of Irish history, collected and col-
lated oriental MSS, was permeated with patristic knowledge and
did much original critical work in editions of several of the early
Fathers—Polycarp and Ignatius and St Barnabas. He was a
voluminous correspondent with all great researchers into an-
tiquity-classical, hebraistic, early Christian and oriental. In
short, he was one of the very greatest of English scholars. Thomas
Gataker, puritan rector of Rotherhithe, wrote his Cinnus, sive
Adversaria Miscellanea and learned commentaries on books of
the Old Testament, and established for himself as high a repu-
tation for oriental scholarship abroad as in England. John Selden,
in his De Dis Syris (in Latin), 1617, investigated the history of
the idol deities mentioned in the Old Testament, and made his
work a comprehensive enquiry into both Syrian and other heathen
theologies. Joseph Mede, an encyclopaedic scholar in mathe-
matics, physics, botany, anatomy and astrology, was, also, a pro-
found 'Hebrician,' and added to the store of scholarship in
Egyptology and in the origin of Semitic religions. Brian Walton's
great polyglot Bible, in progress from 1652 to 1657, must rank as
the highest peak of English co-operative scholarship in a period
which was remarkable both in its wealth of eruditional effort and
in the significance of its concentration of deepest learning on the
Bible centre. This stupendous polyglot Bible uses altogether nine


## p. 319 (#335) ############################################

Hebrew Scholarship
319
different languages, Greek, Hebrew, Samaritan, Chaldee, Syriac,
Arabic, Ethiopic, Persian, Latin, though no part of the Bible is
given in more than six or less than three languages simultaneously.
In addition to texts, there is a vast body of apparatus, e. g. treatises
on weights and measures, geographical charts, chronological tables
and prolegomena, Chaldee Targums; and one of the six folios
consists of various readings and critical remains. Brian Walton,
the editor, afterwards bishop of Chester, published an introduction
to oriental languages, but was by no means the most learned scholar
assisting in the polyglot. Among the collaborators were Ussher and
Selden, already mentioned; John Lightfoot, the greatest Hebrew
scholar of that age; Abraham Wheelock, first lecturer in Arabic
combined with (Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, and an acknow-
ledged scholar in Persian; Samuel Clarke, architypographus of
Oxford university, 'inferior only to Pococke in Eastern learn-
ing. Finally must be mentioned Meric Casaubon, son of Isaac
Casaubon, who published classical commentaries on Marcus
Antoninus (1643), and Epictetus (1659), and had written in 1650
a commentary on the Hebrew and (Anglo-Saxon languages.
Curious as the combination of Old English and Hebrew may
seem, it marks the two new directions of English research in
the period, the joy of the discovery that Britain, too, had
antiquities and an ancient church history. From various sources,
the conviction gathered strength that there were more ancient
civilisations than Greece, which threw light on the classics and on
Jewish history. The supply of Hebrew grammars, even of English
production, was adequate ; and, in 1646, Edward Leigh’s Critica
Sacra was published, the best Hebrew lexicon which had yet been
produced in England. In 1644, an ordinance of the Lords and
Commons, 'after advice had with the Assembly of Divines,'
required, amongst other qualifications of candidates for the
ministry, 'that trial be made of skill in the Original Tongues by
reading the Hebrew and Greek Testaments and rendering some
portions of them into Latin. '
Sixteenth century classical studies had provided huge quarries
from which the seventeenth century dug out further materials; but,
with their instruments sharpened and improved by practice, scholars
proceeded to undertake pioneering operations on a wider scale.
The pedagogical maxim of 'turn all knowledge to use was now
more sedulously followed. The knowledge of Hebrew and oriental
languages developed with amazing rapidity, even as scientific
studies advanced by leaps and bounds, after Bacon's summons to


## p. 320 (#336) ############################################

320 Scholars and Scholarship, 1600—60
make good the deficiencies of past ages in the world of knowledge.
In both cases, however, this splendid progress was due to the inces-
sant and life-long toil of classical humanists and grammarians in
perfecting methods of enquiry and research, in firing the imagina-
tion with re-constituted empires and literatures and in framing
standards of evidence. The intellectual recovery of Roman and
Greek literature and antiquities had shown the way for discoveries
in ancient life and institutions, and had taught men how to treat,
for purposes of illustration and comparison, the civilisations of
Hebrew and the other oriental peoples, our own Old English
antiquities and those of ancient Ireland. The investigation of
those languages, literatures and institutions made necessary an
enquiry into ancient times, and scholarly methods were required
for this. In this respect, scholars like Gataker, Selden, Wheelock
and Ussher obey the traditions of Budaeus, Casaubon and Scaliger,
though in other directions, and often non passibus aequis. But,
in the case of English scholars of this period, there is this differ-
ence-the scholarly aim in all directions was subservient to the
religious interest.
In the universities, theology' was the chief subject, and, as
J. Bass Mullinger says, with few exceptions, secured the attention
of all those who contended for intellectual distinction, for popu-
larity and for the prizes of high office and social influence.